The premise of the series is that all humans once lived in the sea until some left the sea to live on land, and the series’s central conflict is about the hostile dynamic between the sea dwellers and the land dwellers. So, pretty rich worldbuilding right?
Wrong!
The society under the sea looks exactly like society on land, which is…odd, considering the sea came first. Shouldn’t land-life be modeled after sea-life and not the other way around? Well, considering there are more opportunities on land, I might be able to buy that the sea society took recursive inspiration from land society, and all of the cool things *inherent* to land that sea-dwellers could never have created on their own, however this still doesn’t make sense for this story, because:
1) sea-dwellers seem to hate land-dwellers at large, and they forbid sea-land marriage because their children can’t breathe underwater and it shrinks the population. So why would they be copying land society and not be very defensive of their pre-existing culture? Shouldn’t they be scared land culture will eclipse sea culture?
2) They have things like stairs, cups, and electricity. What? Forget culture, this shouldn’t even be possible. How the hell are they drinking out of cups? Why am I watching someone underwater iron their clothes with an electric iron that’s plugged into the wall?
It’s lazy. The writers created an interesting concept for worldbuilding and didn’t want to follow through with it. They wanted the reward without putting in any of the work.
But hey, I can ignore lazy worldbuilding if it just exists to fuel the character drama and relationships, which is the heart of most stories—especially this one. Unfortunately, the characters don’t serve it much better.
All of the characters are two-dimensional cardboard cutouts that makes me feel like TV Tropes needs to be credited for their creation. There’s Hikari, a standard male tsundere who is just kind of an ass for no reason, especially to the girl he likes, Monaka, the standard cutesy, shy nice girl who spends a lot of her screentime squealing, Chisaki, the…other girl, and Kaname, who is supposed to be the chill, nice guy meant to contrast Hikari’s tsundere behavior, but he’s so boring I forget he exists when he isn’t on screen. Kaname is the worst offender, because we almost immediately get introduced to a land boy named Tsumugu who is also chill and nice while also being way more plot relevant.
The only reason there are this many characters anyways is so we can have a convoluted love conga line that goes like Kaname > Chisaki > Hikari > Monaka > Tsumugu. If it weren’t for the love conga line half of the characters would be irrelevant.
And oh boy is the love conga line something. It’s needlessly melodramatic, and it causes these characters to freak out and cry and run away, which I find to be very silly considering they’re all friends who love each other and this could easily be solved by just talking to each other. But then again they’re 14, so what do I know? Maybe their wild incompetence is just middle school behavior. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
This love conga line then proceeds to get weird in the second half of the story after a dramatic shift, but I’m not going to spoil it. Let’s just say it doesn’t go how you would expect it to at all, and that’s not a compliment.
I’m particularly disappointed in A Lull in the Sea because I *wanted* to like it, as there were a lot of things I was genuinely interested in. No matter what, I still wanted to learn more about the mysteries of the sea (especially considering the major shift the story takes halfway through) and the setting was super interesting. I also really liked the plotline about blended families and accepting a new step-parent—it was really heartwarming! I even found myself liking Hikari in his role in the blended family plot (although this was, once again, before the dramatic shift halfway through where things got very weird). I also liked the themes of accepting change and having to let go of old things and accept new things.
Unfortunately the worldbuilding just…makes no sense, and the characters aren’t doing it any favors either.
